There Is Such Noise & Gravity

Gravity's Rainbow, by Thomas Pynchon, was one of Jeremy Eric Tenenbaum's favorite books. In early 2001, Jeremy and I made plans to do a series of readings in Philadelphia, including one at Jeremy's alma mater, Villanova University, off in the 'burbs. We had both had some recent success: Jeremy had twice had poems published in the Columbia Poetry Review (Columbia Chicago), once in 1999 and once in 2000, and my Icarus In New York had just been released in American Writing 21. Jeremy used a quote from the Pynchon book as a title for the series: "There Is Such Noise & Gravity." We did Big Jar Books, Book Trader, and the Villanova show in (I believe) March '01, also with J.D. Mitchell, a novelist and new friend of ours. What I remember about these readings is that Jeremy liked things to run in a punctilious fashion, and they didn't, always. He also liked to maintain his place as the center of attention. There was already a drift, in 2001, from Jeremy, away from literature, and towards graphic design, video work, and photography, which is mostly what he did in the Philly Free School years. I was still recovering from the 2000 slog of my own ambitious performance project, This Charming Lab, which straddled the same worlds PFS would later, but with less success. All my new 2001 routines focused on literature as the centerpiece of my creative life; until 2001, it was literature in contention with drama, popular music, and other interests. Hopefully, someone somewhere has the Jeremy fliers for There Is Such Noise & Gravity. Jeremy's graphic design eye was borderline flawless.

Another occurrence in '02 which did not involve Jeremy: I did a series of readings at the North Cafe on South Street, under the aegis of Natalie Felix, a poetess/performance artist roughly my age who had set up shop in South Philly at the time. My writing in '02 often involved rigorous imitations of Romantic poets Keats, Shelley, and Wordsworth; both the forms they used and their thematic tropes. This turned out to be all on the road to On Love in 2003. Fortunately or unfortunately, much of the formalist writing I did in '02 is now lost to time. I later dismissed the poems as too derivative to be published, with the exception of On Love and On Psyche, which appeared in American Writing 23. Natalie Felix was an indulgent presence, even as her own poetry tended towards spoken word formality. In all honesty, I can't remember why Jeremy was never able to make it to the North Cafe. I do remember that much of the formalist stuff (including On Love) coalesced thematically around my relationship with Mary Harju. Jeremy liked Mary immediately.